Twisted Administration
by KhepriWeaver
Summary: What if Taylor went through the locker ordeal, but didn't trigger? What if she was made an offer she couldn't afford to refuse? What if she got powers out of the deal anyway, despite long odds?


Originally got a version of this power in a short-lived game of Weaver Dice, fell in love with the concept and have tried to play with it a few times in other games. Now writing a story where Taylor's got it cuz nobody can say I can't. Sorry if this first part's short and boring, I've written and unwritten it like four different ways and none of them were really satisfying while still explaining what's going on sufficiently IMO.

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Experimentation 1.1

Trying to retain the images that swam before her mind's eye was about as successful as holding water in layered sieves, but Taylor gave it her best shot anyway. Despite her efforts, visions of planets and crystals slipped from her memory as her awareness of her body and surroundings took precedent once more. The first thing she noticed was a lack of migraines, the first moments lacking the constant mental pain since she'd awoken in the hospital, and the revelation nearly brought her to tears. Sterile white surfaces surrounded her, with a handful of blurry objects filling the small room she'd been brought to. As she picked herself up off the floor and rubbed her eyes, the room came sharply into focus, catching her off-guard for a moment. She glanced at the desk where her glasses still lay, as if to confirm she hadn't donned them without noticing. The process had fixed more than her brain...

Taylor's attention was drawn to three points in space - they was no visual clue of them, but it's like she just instinctively knew where they were in relation to herself. One distant, a bit behind her but far below...one almost straight ahead of her, not even fifty feet...one to her right a ways and one floor up, moving along at a steady pace. Her focus shifted to the moving point, and information flooded her brain. It was like a thousand lines of lengthy code, each bit tying elegantly into all the others, working towards a singular overall purpose. As she looked closer, she could see how the different parts of it worked - one section letting the host phase out of reality such that they barely interacted with it physically, these several lines that dictated temporary short-range cloning, a few lines here and there that managed how the host's inter-dimensional phasing was managed such that the clones could take up the 'same space' without blocking each other but could still interact with the primary reality simultaneously. Each look deeper brought on the barely hints of the promise of a headache in the future, but it was nothing despite how thoroughly she was analyzing the functions of the code.

A speaker hummed to life in the ceiling above her, and the doctor's detached tone reverberated out: "We will now begin a limited power-testing phase. Please stand by." Almost immediately, a hole in space opened at the far end of the room. The portal itself became a new point of awareness in Taylor's mind, but it had a different flavor to it than that of the other points; on some level, she understood that it was a manifestation of powers, rather than a source of them, and while she had some vague understanding of what defined this particular instance (this portal lead to a point approximately three miles behind and one mile below her), the source of the doorways was not within her range so the limitations of the ability that created it were not within her understanding, either in the broad-stroke nature of her understanding of the points she hadn't focused on, nor that of the more in-depth analysis she had performed on the self-duplicating ghost.

All of these thoughts flitted through her mind in a fraction of a second upon the portal's creation. A figure stepped through the portal and became another point within her awareness. She was young and rather pretty, in a well-fitted suit and fedora, and she moved with a casual confidence Taylor rarely saw in anyone. The woman took a seat where the doctor had been not too long ago and met Taylor's gaze unflinchingly. Taylor focused on the woman's point, and immediately regretted her decision - the code was there, but it was infinitely longer than that of the other point she'd analyzed, it was far more complex, twisting into and around itself ad infinitum, and even just becoming aware of it was bringing the migraines back worse than they'd ever been. She pulled away as quickly as she could, carefully not focusing too close on the woman's point; while she remained aware of her location, and had a vague sense that the woman could...predict the future?...she didn't dare look deeper than she had already. Taylor half-suspected the effort might well kill her, but had no way of being sure. Belatedly, she realized she'd nearly collapsed against the wall, and the doctor was saying something...

"...too deep, but instead just try to...push yourself at her." The portal was gone, leaving only Taylor and the headache-inducing woman alone in the room. She tried to focus on the woman without looking deeper at her powers, just trying to know exactly where she was (twelve o' clock, eight feet, identical elevation). As the connection grew, she tried the doctor's advice and pushed at the point with her mind. Her perspective abruptly shifted with an almost inaudible 'pop', and Taylor was hit with a brief wave of fatigue. The woman was still staring her down, despite her instantaneous repositioning. "Very good, Miss Hebert. Continuing pulling like that as long as you can, if you please."

Nearly a dozen pops later, each immediately following the last, Taylor was on her hands and knees, vision swimming as she fought to stay conscious. Each successive jump built on the exhaustion of the previous one until she couldn't manage another jump no matter how she tried. As she felt her guts rebelling, she vaguely heard the woman speak for the first time since entering the room, and another portal opened up just before Taylor, barely big enough to stick her head through. Taylor grabbed the edges of the hole in reality and retched, emptying her stomach of the bland hospital food she'd been eating for days now. She muttered thanks to the woman once her jaw wasn't locking open anymore. She nodded, before standing and exiting the room through another door.

When she'd passed through, the portal flickered, and this time a massive man came through - nearly eight feet tall and ripped, with skin like pebbles and a shiny bald head. He eyed her carefully, but said nothing. "Continue when you're able to," the doctor instructed. Taylor gave a shaky laugh and leaned against the wall for a minute or so as she waited for her limbs to stop shaking. The man looked to be fidgeting, maybe a bit impatient, but Taylor wasn't interested in pushing herself too far during this - it wouldn't help her, and it wouldn't help the doctor, and that was the whole point of the experiment in the first place, so he could just wait. She pushed herself away from the wall and focused her attention on him: once more, she saw the code that made up his abilities, but this time it wasn't a headache to observe: a slight twist on the usual Alexandria package, his body was an outer layer of strange metallic alloys with a regenerative rubbery core, combining to make difficult to harm while sending him bouncing away from more physical blows; additionally, rather than a proper flight power, he could control the direction in which gravity pulled at him, although the rate of acceleration would remain constant. She pushed herself towards him, and began experimenting as the doctor directed her to do so.

She learned a few interesting things along the way: now that she was able to actually observe the code while leaping, she could see that her leaps were sort of shotgunning new code over the old code, improving whatever function it had possessed before. She couldn't really control what it changed about him, though: sometimes it enhanced the strength of the skin-alloys, sometimes it gave him some control over the knock-back he'd suffer from blows, sometimes it made his control over the direction of gravity's pull a bit more refined, sometimes it let him adjust the intensity of the pull...and none of the changes held for more than a minute. Whatever had 'installed' the powers in the first place seemed to be constantly trying to overwrite her changes, but it usually took a bit to get back to where they were. Once, the random improvements happened to overlap on the same aspect of his power (the speed at which he could change gravity's direction), and it was stronger than it had been even immediately after the initial improvement. Once she'd exhausted herself again, the man stood and left through a portal that opened just in time for him to walk through.

The testing continued in this vein for what felt like an eternity. A new person would enter the room, sometimes decidedly inhuman, but usually pretty normal, and she would throw herself at them until she couldn't anymore. Perhaps halfway through, when she was working some cyrokinetic woman, she got the idea to try pulling the target to herself, rather than pushing herself towards them. While it didn't teleport them to her position as she'd expected, the experiment still bore fruit: she saw her leap randomly change many parts of the woman's coding as usual, but now instead of improvements, all the parts Taylor had touched were worse than they'd been before...and that particular leap wasn't anywhere near as tiring as pushing had been. The woman looked a little nervous following the jump, but Taylor kept leaping using the pulling method until she couldn't anymore, determined to see how far she could push this.

At the end of things, she jumped nearly thirty times before she couldn't jump like that anymore, and the cyrokinetic was left with only the barest dregs of her power starting to trickle back in; Taylor may have exhausted herself doing it, but at least for several seconds the cape before her was barely any better than a bog-standard human. The woman practically ran from the room as Taylor collapsed against the wall, a wide grin spreading across her face despite herself. It was finally sinking in that this wasn't all just some fever dream, it was really happening, she'd taken a huge risk and come out on top. She had powers, serious powers, with serious potential.

The testing continued.

...

"Thank you for your cooperation, Miss Hebert. The data we've gathered today will be...useful, for future clients," the doctor's voice echoed in the now nearly-empty room. The testing had continued for nearly an hour, and past the thirty minute mark, even the brief breaks barely felt like enough to catch her breath after each exhaustive series of teleportations. "Our business, at least for today, is concluded. We'll keep in touch as per your contract. Please collect your things and exit." On cue, a hole in space opened at the far end of the room, much like how the doctor had exited earlier, leading out of the unwelcoming testing facility and back into her room in the hospital - itself far from comforting, but certainly more so than whatever this place was.

Taylor shivered despite herself as she pocketed her glasses and the very brief note of what she owed going forward - little more than a dollar amount, an interest rate, a time period, and a separate number she new referred to favors owed. No doubt its brevity was just another layer of the almost constant cloak-and-dagger that the last two hours or so of her life had been immersed in, but she found herself not really wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth. Whatever deal with the devil she'd signed today, she was at least healed of her mental maladies, if nothing else. Taylor stepped through the portal slowly, and it shut behind her as soon as she was all the way through, leaving her with only the distant sounds of snoring patients and tiptoeing nurses. She climbed back into her bed and stared at the ceiling for a bit, digesting everything that had transpired.


End file.
